Emergency Drop (rewrite)
by The Late Cmdr. Jameson
Summary: The fate of Sauria and ultimately the Lylat system rests on the shoulders of a profiteer from a distant galaxy and the sole survivor of a doomed world. Email linked to original account was lost, sorry for the delay.
1. Prologue: Go Bump in the Night

For the mods over at SB: Yes, I'm an electrocuted tomato. Never seen one before?

—

" _WARNING: FRAMESHIFT CONDUIT UNSTABLE!_ "

Although the _Vanguard_ 's command deck was buried deep within its hull, two-meter tall flight-screens lining the forward bulkhead provided an uninterrupted view of the dark, nebulous expanse of Witchspace uncontrollably pitching, twisting, and rolling as an unseen Thargoid pursuer bore down on the Anaconda-class light frigate from directly aft, its Alcubierre bubble firmly in the grip of the nightmarish alien vessel.

The deck's sole occupant, a figure clad in a Remlok flight suit and seated at the helm position, seemed almost oblivious to both the nauseous display ahead and the metallic groaning reverberating through the command deck as the _Vanguard_ 's structural members strained against involuntary maneuvers the stately, one-hundred-and-fifty meter long craft was never intended to perform. He gripped the seat-mounted side-stick with a single gloved hand, more out of habit than any possible use during a hyperjump, while his other flew over the command console mounted just below the various holographic displays encircling his position.

Soon, his efforts were rewarded by a soft _click_ \- barely audible over the cacophony of his Anaconda's frameshift drive fighting a losing match of tug-of-war against the alien craft rapidly bearing down on him, all the while hurtling through the barely-understood dimension of Witchspace at velocities that told humanity's current model of physics in no uncertain terms to go and fuck itself. Satisfied, he lifted the clear synthplas guard over a particular switch labeled "FSD Manual Override" and flipped it with a gloved finger.

" _WARNING: DRIVE SAFETIES DISENGAGED_."

In spite of the generally unpleasant circumstances of being a Thargoid's quarry, Commander Mark Jrichtson grinned and leaned back slightly in his seat. "Thanks. I might have missed it otherwise." He grasped the secondary throttle with his left hand -the first increment would send the ship into supercruise, while the second ordered the FSD to charge for a hyperjump, provided the _Vanguard_ 's bow was aligned with the target destination. At the moment, he had no intention of pushing the small lever to either.

During standard operation, the throttle's only "negative" increment -marked "E-D" in unmistakeable red lettering- was locked out of use by automated safeties hard-coded into the light frigate's drive control systems, and for good reason. With said safeties deactivated and the throttle pulled back, the secondary throttle would briefly cut the juice flowing from the seventy-two-point-six metric ton fusion powerplant into the Anaconda's active frameshift drive, violently hurling the entire ship back into realspace. Performed in supercruise, it was a tactic of last resort intended to shake a vastly superior foe.

To his knowledge, no Commander had ever executed the maneuver mid-hyperjump and lived to tell the tale.

"There's a first time for everything." He hesitated slightly, glancing up at the viewscreens before him. There was a tiny pinprick of light at the end of the infinite tunnel of Witchspace. That was bad. Very bad. His EM Shutdown countermeasures were all but depleted, and if he was pulled out now...well, a shieldless and disabled Anaconda was no match for a Thargoid. Fresh images sprung to mind - dozens of the the radial, almost cnidarian shapes of Thargoid Cyclopses and Basilisks that resembled grotesque hybrids of plant and insect surrounding the four-kilometer long Ocellus-class station, their actinic yellow tendrils of lightning carving up the orbiting city's hull. The same weapons tearing through the assorted, hastily-scrambled evacuation ships as they left New Tevarin's atmosphere.

He shook the thoughts from his head. The aperture ahead had grown considerably, now easily visible without any magnification on the screen's part. He'd been lucky so far - the average hyperdiction measured only seconds. In a moment, he'd know if it had held.

Mark slammed back the frameshift control throttle as far as the damn thing would go.


	2. Any landing you can walk away from

Commander Mark Jrichtson awoke to the dim red glow of emergency lighting in near-total silence.

Picking himself up off his prone position on the reinforced decking, he came face-to-face with a small pile of ceramic shards resting before him, the closest of which read "ade it to Hutton Or" and "22 L". His body felt strangely heavy- a sensation which somehow seemed familiar, although in his freshly-conscious state he could not remember exactly why. Taking one of the shards in a gloved hand, he was surprised to find that it clattered back to the deck after being released, rather than remaining suspended in place. He repeated the process several times before the realization finally hit him.

" _Gravity...planet...I'm on a planet! Or a moon. No one remembers the moons_."

He glanced back at the vacant helmsman's position, noting with chagrin that the seat restraints had been and still remained retracted. " _Fancy new inertial vectoring chair's made me soft_ ," he groused silently. The flight-screens along with every last display located on the Vanguard's spacious command deck were dark, the sole source of illumination provided by the crimson glow of emergency lights. A quick once-over revealed that he seemed to have been spared any severe injuries, and anything more thorough would have to wait.

"Fuck. Well, figuring out exactly where the hell I am won't be a bad start."

Mark returned to the helm position and initiated a manual reboot. The effort was met with silence, dark displays, and a distinct lack of the familiar DeLacy OS chime.

"That's just bloody brilliant. Off to try something different, then."

The Reorte-based engineers had done their jobs well. In the event of power failure, the nav subsystem(s) was self contained and fed by a reserve battery...with a little luck, it might just start. Several seconds passed before the holographic Navigation and Contacts panel finally flickered to life. Mark wasted no time in quickly selecting a tab labeled "Galaxy Map", eagerly awaiting some form of progress.

" ** _NO CONNECTION AVAILABLE . REVERTING TO LOCAL BACKUP OF UNIVERSAL CARTOGRAPHICS(R) GALAXY MAP. STAND BY…"_**

" ** _ERROR CODE:1d29482cef ERROR: NO REFERENCE TO CURRENT POSITION FOUND. IF THIS ISSUE PERSISTS PLEASE CONTACT YOUR LOCAL UNIVERSAL CARTOGRAPHICS FIELD OFFICE OR OUR GALNET SITE."_**

Mark blinked incredulously at the glowing orange text plastered across the holographic panel for several seconds in disbelief. "The hell…okay, no sense in wasting more time here. Bridge's dead and the one thing still online isn't exactly of much help." As he turned to stand from his seat, he reached beneath the console before him, gloved fingers quickly finding the edge of a panel recessed flush with the console housing. After a moment, he succeeded in prying open the small compartment and retrieved the Hassoni-Krueger Model 83 light coilgun along with the five combination power cell/magazines stowed within...one of which he snapped into the unloaded handgun's mag well, although he left the safety on as he turned to leave.

"Finally, a solid line of defense against hard vacuum, lethal levels of radiation, and whatever waiting behind this bulkhead that's escaped mention. Real indispensable, Mark."

—

The damage was about as bad as he'd expected. Probably worse, actually. Sure, auxiliary power was up and running, but even with every last heat sink in the tubes automatically popped on realspace entry the badly overtaxed FSD had overheated spectacularly, fusing nearby power transfer cables into a charred, molten mass and kicking off a fire that had necessitated the full depressurization of two internal compartments to extinguish. His ship's other core modules hadn't gotten off easily either; magnetic containment and vectoring in the aft fusion thrusters was shot and the Vanguard's Class 8 powerplant had been killed in the crash as a safety measure. The lone spot of hope was Deck 3 - housing the dorsal launch and retrieval bay and the machine shop fabricators, it was furthest from the damage and had survived the crash mostly unscathed.

" ** _LOCALIZED CABIN PRESSURE ALERT. DEPRESSURIZED AREA HAS BEEN AUTOMATICALLY CORDONED. PULL DOWN AND HOLD TO INITIATE MANUAL OVERRIDE._** "

Mark dismissed the automated alert before checking the CMM fibre tether securely attached to his suit and a bulkhead shackle, bracing for the impending rush of air. Even crouched low to the deck, it slammed into him like a Lavian beast of burden, only subsiding several seconds later. Stepping into the ruined compartment, the blackened frameshift drive housing and decking slick with the remnants of fire-suppression foam only confirmed the damage report retrieved from one of the few operable terminals in Primary Engineering.

"Shit. I'm not leaving this rock anytime soon. Not like there's anywhere to leave for without a functioning Galmap." He turned to exit the compartment and began heading topside. With just a little more luck, the backup Auto-Field Maintenance Unit had been transferred to the machine shop during a hasty repair job at Suffolk Hub...right before it was ripped apart by the bugs. Hazy memories of his involvement in the desperate Battle of Jataya surfaced to mind, memories that he just as quickly forced back out. He really didn't need the distraction right about now.

—

The total darkness of the passageway ahead was only illuminated by his helmet-mounted floodlamps. Although power to much of the deck was cut, the bulkheads running along either side seemed free of any visible damage. Rounding a corner, he soon arrived at his destination: the internal hangar access airlock. Out of curiosity, he tried the console...as expected, nothing. Sighing, he unslung the small portable power cell pack and prybar he'd snagged from the machine shop on his way there, placing both on the deck before crouching near an access panel and taking the latter implement to peel away the metal plate and expose the wiring beneath. After a few minutes, the lock was once again operable and he cycled it open before stepping inside.

As he entered the hangar bay, Commander Mark Jrichtson witnessed the first bit of good news he'd had in over several hours. The sleek, gloriously intact hull of his heavily modified Gutamaya GU350i Courier-class light multirole gleamed dully under his helmet lights, it's smooth, contoured lines a stark contrast to the _Vanguard_ 's boxy, utilitarian design. Even after he'd hit the surface, the undercarriage locks had held. Keying in a command on his wristcomp, he climbed onto the craft's lowered access ramp and made his way into the cockpit, quickly booting up the main interface under reserve power -" _no sense in spooling up the reactor now_ ", he thought- before scrolling through the subsystem readings panel. Satisfied that his craft was in operating condition, he returned through the access hatch into the darkened hangar bay, now in greatly higher spirits than he had been just a few minutes ago. Destruction of his former home and marooning on a desolate airless rock be damned, he had a ship once again, and a bloody fast one at that! Of course, with auxiliary power to the bay still offline, the Courier wasn't flying anywhere...no way in hell was his tiny power pack going to open the massive thirty-eight meter long armored bay doors even a fraction of a centimeter. Still, there would be time to sort that out later - right now he had a planet to visit.

—

Within the _Vanguard_ 's medbay, a small refrigeration unit sat behind a row of padded cots, the retracted bin inside extending with a pressurized hiss. Inside rested several rows of miniature vials, one of which Mark gently removed with a pair of gloved fingers.

It was never the things you could _see_ that would end up killing you, oh no. That would be too easy. A slow, painful death to alien pathogens was not a pretty way to go out, and the disastrous Lycaon and Odysseus expeditions were more than enough proof of that. Prometheus Medical, a megacorporate giant already renowned for their Stimtek line of performance enhancers ordered in bulk by factional and private militaries across the human bubble and the ubiquitous, intravenously delivered "juice" that allowed spacecraft crews to survive high-g acceleration conscious and uninjured was one of the first corporations that had rushed in to fill the gap. The first production runs of ImmunAug nanites had hit the open market only a few months later, and were heavily marketed towards long-range explorers who often spent months in uncharted space at a time and occasionally conducted planetside surveys of newly-discovered worlds. Mark snapped one of the small canisters into a receptacle on his suit, feeling the pinprick of a needle in his left shoulder a few seconds later.

—

Mark checked his equipment one last time as he headed for the shattered viewport of the forward observation deck in lieu of the ventral boarding ramp, currently crushed beneath the light frigate's nine-hundred-and-fifty ton bulk. The handheld atmospheric data collection unit joined his coilgun sidearm resting in a holster on his suit's hip, along with the four magazines of ammunition as he once again secured his suit tether to a nearby bulkhead-mounted loop. As the doors to the observation deck ground open…

...nothing could have prepared him for what awaited outside.


	3. Welcome Committee

The brilliant rays of an alien sun streamed in through the jagged, mud-spattered remnants of the forward observation deck's wraparound viewport. It wasn't until Mark left the mostly buried compartment through the least painful-looking part of the breach he could find that he received his first shock: the first thing he saw after his boots hit alien soil was green. Lots of it, stretching out for kilometers in every direction. Up ahead only a short distance away was the edge of a dense forest, the thickly-trunked conifers oddly reminiscent of those growing in the small groves inside Suffolk Hub's outer agricultural ring - evidently, he'd hit the surface at least partially within a small clearing.

The second was the very conspicuous lack of ship atmosphere rushing out into vacuum. He had locked down the first door sealing off the passageway leading to the observation deck entrance, but there was enough air in the corridor for a decent kick. Abundant flora, atmospheric density at least equal to that required to sustain human life...Mark checked his suit environment readings - atmosphere temp near the surface was a balmy 25.56 degrees Celsius -...everything about this strange new planet screamed "Earthlike World". His day had just taken a turn for the absurd - bodies that met all of the conditions necessary to support even rudimentary multicellular life were infamously rare, and ones that could do the same for human biology even more so. Of course, there was the question of the atmosphere's gaseous makeup, but going from fleeing for life and ship from a system overrun with Thargoids to milling about in pristine alien woodland was _not_ something he'd expected to experience in his lifetime.

Mark set down the small gas analysis unit on the verdant ground as his suit's integrated sensor suite alerted him to multiple, jumbled IR signatures emerging from the trees. Faint signatures to be sure, but definitely there. The beings that came into view seconds later could only be described as extras from a low-budget SimEma flick; hulking, reptilian bipeds decked out in crudely-forged armor of leather and iron, the largest among them well over two meters tall and sporting a cuirass that would seem perfectly at home serving as plating on a light armored vehicle. Every last one was armed with equally archaic weaponry, ranging from almost comically large polearms to primitive smoothbores sporting flared muzzles and oversized hammers that reminded Mark of some of the antique pieces in Bill Turner's collection all the way back in Alioth...however far away that was.

The creature he guessed to be in command (going off its elaborately ridged helmet) turned his head to face the rest before speaking in a guttural rumble.

 _ **"Bacc kxo adkohcefoh udt joaqo kxo lojjoc.**_ _**Wodohuc**_ _**Scales nacc ro mejk fcoujot."**_

Mark drew his Model 83 from its holster before placing it on the ground, right on the edge of the large gully the _Vanguard_ had plowed into the verdant earth before coming to a stop. Switching on his helmet's voice amplifier, he raised his gloved hands above his head. _Chances of getting anything across in English are slim to none, but what the hell,_ he thought.

"This is Commander Mark Jrichtson of the IRV Vanguard, registered under the Pilot's Federation of Lave. My craft has sustained extensive damage to core internal systems and was forced to perform an emergency landing at this location. This was not intended as a hostile action. I repeat, I am not engaging in hostile action against any recognized soverHOLY SHIT!"

As the commanding reptilian leveled his saber with the crashed frigate, the musket-toting lizards raised their weapons and fired off a thunderous volley in the suited human's general direction before the remaining warriors charged in, axes and spears brandished above their heads.

Mark dove for cover behind the gully embankment, scrambling for his discarded handgun. Shoved was more like it, actually - crude though they might be, two of the musket balls had caught him right in the chest, and the impacts felt like getting slammed by a drydock repair crane. Still, the micrometeor-resistant plating had held, and as his fingers closed around the CMM composite grip of the H&K Model 83 he flicked off the safety before sighting in on the lead berserker, his visor's integrated display placing the orange pipper over what it assumed was the thing's center of mass.

"My bad, change of plans!" The coilgun's harsh buzzing _crack_ cut through the second volley of musket fire, their booming reports echoing off the downed frigate's hull. Two 35-gram armatureless ferrous slugs punched through the warrior's light armor at a little over seven hundred meters per second and right out the other side, sending the lizard toppling to the ground with a mass of liquified tissue for internal organs. Mark sighted and fired again, this time cutting down a spearman(lizard?) mid-charge. The remaining aliens slowed down, their advance briefly halted by this new foe with the tiny firestick who had felled two Sharpclaw warriors in almost just as many seconds.

Mark took advantage of the momentary reprieve to swap out his magazine, glancing back up just in time to see blackpowder smoke drifting up from the oddly flared muzzles of the three largest w- _Oh shit._

Three iron-cased spheres buried themselves in the ground just before the embankment Mark had taken cover behind. He scrambled away, hoping to clear the center of the blast...rookie mistake. The crude grenades detonated in a plume of dirt and splintered rock with a deafening _KRATHUMP ,_ blasting out a wave of shrapnel and quartzite shards that sliced into the unarmored portions of his suit as a sensation roughly comparable to being splattered with molten metal exploded across his back. Strangely enough, although the shrill O2-mixture-tank-breach alarm sounded in his ears, the actual O2 concentration drop he was reading was far less rapid than he expected. If he didn't manage to force the angry natives into a retreat or at least hold them off long enough to fall back into the relative safety of the _Vanguard_ , he was a dead man anyway.

The staccato report of his Model 83 cracked out yet again and a musket-wielding lizard pitched backwards mid-reload, it's weapon clattering to the ground beside the body. As he turned to fall back towards the busted forward viewport of his downed Anaconda, the giant brute with the tank-armor cuirass charged out from just around the craft's bow barely five meters away, waraxe hefted high above it's head. Mark raised his coilgun and fired blindly at the hulking reptilian, but the rounds failed to penetrate the thick slabs of moderately enchanted armor, only punching shallow divots in a flurry of sparks and fragments of ferrous alloy. It roared in fury from the hits and slammed it's oversized polearm down at the impudent metal-suited thing. Instinctively, Mark rolled away from the deadly blow, just slightly too late to avoid it entirely.

His visor took the brunt of the blow, the reinforced safety glass shattering into hundreds of small cubes that rattled around what was left of the compact helmet. The display winked out, dead, just as the berserker's axe head glanced away and buried itself in the ground below. Thrown to the side, Mark somehow kept a grip on his sidearm, raising it and firing another burst into the massive lizard as it lifted its waraxe for the killing blow.

 _Bleeding out and a few seconds from being cut in half by the pissed off, armed natives whose planet I had the utterly brilliant fortune to crash on like some thirty-fourth century Magellan. Fucking Thargoids._

A searing crimson bolt slammed into the berserker's center of mass from directly ahead, blasting a half-meter wide glowing crater into the cuirass that had shrugged off high-velocity rounds with near impunity before expanding in a wave of heat that forced Mark's eyes shut behind his partially-demolished faceplate. The thing roared in pain, dropping to it's knees before cutting off to a wet gurgle as a final ferrous slug tore through it's skull.

Pushing himself up as best he could, Mark turned to see who had fired the shot that had likely saved him from a very messy fate. Behind him stood a bipedal, humanoid fox; a female at that, by the top and loincloth she wore. She gripped a strangely ornate staff leveled at the now slumped over and very dead remains of the Sharpclaw brute, before slowly raising it to rest and walking over to offer an extended hand to the supine Commander.

"Are you quite alright?"

It was a line was spoken in perfect English, with a slight Old Britannia accent.


End file.
